


After 02x15 (The Maltese Falcon Job) Part II

by PseudoLeigha



Series: (More) 2AM Conversations [29]
Category: Leverage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-02 22:55:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6585988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliot and Parker talk about Parker almost killing Tara.</p><p>Also, Eliot must be a masochist, because he agreed to a road-trip with /Parker/.</p><p>This one is longer, and it's been written since... before the rest of season 2, definitely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After 02x15 (The Maltese Falcon Job) Part II

The team spent two nights holed up in one of Sophie’s safehouses, just long enough to pull themselves back together and talk about exactly what had gone wrong. From there they scattered, spending eight weeks anywhere but Boston, before returning to watch Nate testify against Culpepper and Kadjic, and then in his own trial. Parker knew Hardison visited his Nana and foster-siblings before going to Denver to check out a possible new base of operations, if it turned out Boston was totally burned. Laura (as Sophie had decided she was to be called from now on) had to go back to wherever she was when Tara called her to fix Nate, and tie up loose ends. Parker decided to go out west and spend a few weeks jumping off of cliffs and climbing back up them to take her mind off Nate’s declaration that they were family, only moments before abandoning them to save them from prison. Eliot went with her to start with (he was better at climbing than she expected), but after a few days, he got a call about a job in Brazil, and disappeared on short notice, only to turn up again a month later, all cuts and bruises, in no condition to rappel into the Grand Canyon, let alone climb back out.

It was the middle of the night and Eliot was driving on their way back to Boston, when he said, “Hey, Parker, you awake?”

“Kinda.” She wasn’t, really, but she wasn’t really asleep, either. Eliot wouldn’t let her pick the radio station anymore after that she found the Spanish Polka channel. He wouldn’t let her drive, either, after Texas, and they were out of snacks (and “Not stoppin’ again until we get outta this damn state!” because Eliot had something against Missouri), so there wasn’t much to do except stare out the window and almost fall asleep to Eliot’s country music and his sometimes singing along. She uncurled herself in the passenger seat, stretching as well as she could with the seatbelt still on (a precaution Eliot insisted she use, despite her trust in his ability to avoid crashing).

“Talk to me, then. Keep me awake.”

She could do that, she supposed, but she didn’t know what to say. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I dunno, Parker, anything.” That was a lie, and Parker knew it. More than half the time, when she picked what they talked about, he ended up irritated. She stayed silent until he came up with a real suggestion: “Tell me what happened with you and Tara on that roof.”

“Why? That was forever ago,” she reminded him. _Weeks_. Tara was gone, now, and Sophie (Laura) was back, and even if they weren’t, Tara obviously wanted to believe that Parker hadn’t been about to drop her, so she probably wouldn’t come looking for revenge, all of which meant, as far as Parker was concerned, that it hardly mattered.

“Yeah, but we were in that ship so I couldn’t hear on coms, and I never got around to asking what actually happened.”

Parker shrugged to show she didn’t really care either way, and then explained, “Hardison told me she met with the marks and was selling us out, right after we finished dropping off the package. I hung her off the edge of the roof until she explained it was a meeting for Sophie, not for her. And then we went back to the car to meet up with everyone and she said she was worried I was going to drop her, and I said that was silly, and she acted like she believed I wouldn’t actually kill her.”

“Would you have?” Eliot looked away from the road to stare at her face as she answered.

“Yeah.” It was a simple fact. She had come to trust Tara, against her better judgement, over the months they worked together, and when she found out that the woman had betrayed them, she would happily have dropped her off the building. In fact, it would have served her right if Parker hadn’t believed her story about Sophie, after all her sneaking around and not trusting the rest of them, and dropped her anyway.

“Parker…” His eyes flicked back to the road for half a second before finding her face again. “You can’t just…” he trailed off.

“I can’t just what?”

He didn’t answer for what seemed like a long time, though it was really only two and a half minutes. “It changes you, killin’ a person,” he finally said, staring at the road ahead with far-away eyes. “Even if it’s for what seems like a good reason at the time.”

He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, though Parker couldn’t honestly say _she_ did. But maybe that was because she was already broken before she killed anyone, or because she was so young the first time she didn’t really remember what she was like before.

“Have you? Killed people, I mean.” That wasn’t really the question she wanted to ask, because she was pretty sure she already knew the answer, but Sophie had said said it was better to change the subject slowly instead of just assuming your mark would know what you were talking about.

He gave her the ‘stop bein’ stupid,’ look and ground out a single-word answer. “Yes.”

She hadn’t really expected anything else. He had fought in Croatia, after all, and Desert Storm, and there had been hints over the years that his job before he became a retrieval specialist really was as a hitter. “How did it change you?” That was the question she really wanted to know about.

Eliot was quiet even longer this time, but she had learned that if she really wanted him to tell her something, sometimes she had to be patient, like casing a bank or waiting for just the right moment to start dancing through a laser grid. So she waited. Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds later, he answered. “Before… before I joined the Army, I was just a kid. A farm boy. I thought I was all grown up an’ doin’ it for all the right reasons, standin’ up for God and country.”

He shook his head, still looking at the road, before he continued to speak. “I was a damn fool… It was hard at first. They don’t tell you, before you enlist, how hard it is to point a gun at another person and pull the trigger the first time. You go in thinkin’ it’s all or nothin’ but it’s not. ‘Specially if you don’t know when exactly you make your first kill, when you and everyone else is all firin’ at the same time, an’ the enemy’s dead at the end, and it mighta been you, but might not. But you were defendin’ yourself, an’ you’re still alive, and that’s all that matters. They make you think it’s you or them, dehumanize the enemy, until it doesn’t seem wrong to cut down anyone that’s in your way, an’ throw you into hostile territory. It gets easier. Your unit become your brothers, and the enemy become animals.

“You don’t realize how far gone you are and how completely _fucked up_ it all is until you find a reason to step back, and see that it’s not everyone else that’s not human, it’s you, ’cause you turned yourself into a fuckin’ monster.” His voice was harsh, like on a job, and the speedometer was slowly creeping upward. “And then… then you see shadows in your eyes an’ realize you got blood on your hands that ain’t ever gonna wash off, an’ you either throw yourself in deeper ’cause it’s all you know an’ you’re already damned, or you start clawin’ your way back from the brink. But you can’t stop knowin’ that you have that darkness in you, and you can’t ever fix it. You look yourself in the mirror, and you can’t find the kid that used to look back at you. _That’s_ how it changed me, Parker.”

There was a scary note in Eliot’s voice, like he was on the edge of losing control. The needle was hovering at 120, and his knuckles were white on the wheel. Parker might have been, in the eyes of her team mates (and everyone else), fearless when it came to things most people were afraid of, but she could read the warning signs of an angry man well enough, and she didn’t like making people really mad at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say to make this better, that wouldn’t just make him fall apart all at once (and she really didn’t want to see what would happen then).

She kept her mouth shut, thinking about what he had said while she waited for him to calm down, reasoning that he was plenty awake now, and didn’t need her to make conversation. Maybe there was something wrong with her, she thought, mulling over the reason she wanted to know how killing was supposed to change a person, because she had never seen anything in her eyes but her own reflection, and she couldn’t feel the blood on her hands.

She had killed more than once, and for lots of reasons. The Mitchells, the foster family after Danny dying, were first, when she was six, and they were passed out drunk and she accidentally-on-purpose blew up the house (she hadn’t known what would happen when she left the gas stove on, pilot out, except that it was dangerous, because they always said not to), just trying to make enough trouble to get sent somewhere else (though that didn’t mean she hadn’t enjoyed the explosion).

A couple years later there was a man who tried to touch her in a way that eight-year-olds shouldn’t be touched, who hadn’t expected her to be carrying a knife (she was aiming for his hand, but missed, and cut what she learned later had to be his femoral artery – she ran and watched from a rooftop as he bled out beneath her).

The first person she killed on purpose (and the only one she did for revenge) was an older kid on the street – a bully – who thought he could steal from her (a sharp rock to the skull until he stopped moving, and then a few more times for good measure).

The only one she felt a little bad about was a guard in Trinidad on her very first heist without Archie – he grabbed her arm and she panicked and shot him with his own gun before she even realized she had lifted it. She still thought her sixteen-year-old self should have been good enough to escape without shooting him. It was sloppy.

A few years after that there were two Russian guards who did their rounds an hour early, ruining her perfect plan. She was on her way out by then, so the choice had been to kill them and run with her prize or get caught, and Parker never got caught. She had even killed for money a few times, but that was kind of boring, because people were never guarded as well as jewelry or cash.

She couldn’t bring herself to really care about any of them. Death happens to everyone eventually. She didn’t see why it should matter that she was their cause of death, and not some other accident (though Archie’s reaction to her fuckup with the guard in Trinidad told her that other people definitely thought it did). Sure, Eliot had killed a lot more people than she did, but so did hurricanes. It was, so far as she was concerned, nothing to be so near losing control over. It wasn’t like he was about to ruin the lives of a couple dozen children (the only time she could remember being so close to the edge as Eliot looked was in Serbia).

But then, she thought, reflecting on Serbia, maybe he wasn’t upset about what _he_ did. He didn’t know she had killed already. (No one on the team did. She didn’t think they would like it, after their reaction to her wanting to kill Rand, and besides, Leverage didn’t kill people anyway, so why tell them?) Didn’t all this start because he thought Tara would have been her first? Maybe he was worried about her growing up to be like him, like she didn’t want the orphans to grow up like her, all broken and _not right_. He had nothing to worry about, of course (even if she hadn’t already killed), because she was already grown up, but maybe it was kind of the same thing?

Yes… she turned that idea over. It felt like it fit. Now how to use it? She suspected that pointing out she was a grown-up wouldn’t give her enough leverage, and telling him she had already killed would be too much torque, misaligning everything all over again or jamming it all up. What was it Hardison said, back in Belgrade? That he liked the way Parker had turned out? Maybe that would work. Not the exact words, obviously, but what he had meant by them.

“I like you anyway,” she said quietly, as calmly as she could, still scrunched into the corner of the cab, keeping a wary eye on the edgy (ex-)hitter.

It must have been, she judged, a right-enough thing to say, because his eyes flickered toward her briefly, then back to the road, and his hands slowly un-seized from the steering wheel and the speedometer ticked back down.

By the time they hit St. Louis, he looked mostly back to normal, and when they stopped at a motel on the other side of the city for a few hours’ sleep (since she _still_ wasn’t allowed to drive – it was only a _little_ police chase across the Texas panhandle! They weren’t even State police, and she totally outran them before they got to Oklahoma!), he paused outside her door to say, “Thanks, Parker,” in the gruff ‘I mean it’ voice.

She smiled, strongly reminded of the first time he stitched her up, after that awful flight to the Caymans – except this time, he was the one who had (apparently) needed her help. And somehow (she wasn’t exactly sure how) she (apparently) managed to give it to him.

“Any time, Eliot.”

**Author's Note:**

> So what does everyone think of this addition to Parker's backstory? I personally like the idea of her having a fairly casual relationship with death as a concept, as it applies to herself and other people, to the point that she just sees it as another part of life anymore. That doesn't mean, of course, that she is over the loss of her brother - but she puts him in a category of his own, because she loved him and he was taken away from her. If one of the team were to die, she would probably feel the similarly about them. But that's a Season 4 revelation...


End file.
